Google has been very much about saving out of print books by moving them into a digital format over the last seven years. This has been a part of their Google Book Search project, which involved pulling books out of libraries and scanning them in, and thus preserving them forever. Of course, some people prefer a hard copy, and now that’s going to be a possibility as well, at least at some locations.

Looks like Google Street View is in the news again today, but for all the wrong reasons. A Swiss agency has threatened to sue Google because it hasn’t taken to proper privacy considerations into effect, saying that “many images are problematic and insufficiently anonymous.”

What a market leader and major dealer in capital does publicly with their money is revealing. One of the things I admire about Microsoft is that through their Labs and Research initiatives, they’ve done a lot of good work in fields only tangentially connected with Microsoft markets.

Google has some initiatives of their own (if you didn’t know), and green power has been among their favored funding targets for a few years now.Recently they’ve decided that solar power isn’t efficient enough. Well observed, Google! They must have Binged it.

Google is clearly moving fast in setting up partnerships with ebook reader manufacturers and store operators to give some weight to its threat to Amazon and the latter’s Kindle product line.

First, the company teamed up with Sony, adding about 1 million public domain books to the technology giant’s eBook Store.

Now Mountain View has sealed a deal with British Interead, bringing the same amount of ebooks to an online store outside the U.S. for the first time (where close to half a million of them are available for free).

Here it is, AT&T’s statement on what they sent to the FCC regarding the rejection of the Google Voice app on the iPhone. As you can see, unlike last time where the statement was vague, AT&T is clearly stating here that it had nothing to do with the Google Voice rejection. This wording comes from Jim Cicconi, AT&T’s senior executive vice president, external and legislative affairs. Updated with the full AT&T response to the FCC

We’re reaching out to Apple on this right now and will update.

AT&T Statement on Letter to the FCC Regarding Apple App Store

We start the day off with a video, because they’re fun and so, so easy to embed. It’s from The Onion, and it pokes fun at folks who think Google is out to get them.

Lots of people will be arguing today that this was inevitable, but the news comes faster than expected. Google CEO Eric Schmidt is no longer going to sit on Apple’s Board of Directors, nearly 3 years after accepting a seat.

The resignation comes a few days after the FCC sent letters to Google, Apple and AT&T inquiring why Apple denied the Google Voice application from its iPhone App Store.

Here’s Apple’s statement on the matter:

(after the jump)

We know that there are going to be dozens of Android handsets out there within a year, so why shouldn’t they start popping up all over the place? Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that many of these phones will be as exciting as the Hero or Rachel, as this rumored HTC handset shows. It was natural with the G1, myTouch, and others that Android should start in the high end and work its way down — we early adopters were the guinea pigs, as usual.

Now that Android’s first growing pains are over, people can start stuffing it into less-than-stellar handsets and selling it to the unwashed masses.

One of the abilities of smartphones I’ve always coveted is the ability to peek in at your torrents and see how they’re doing. Is that movie finished? Is anyone downloading that pack of videos I put up? These are questions that demand answers while you’re waiting in line at the coffee shop three minutes from your house. Well, Android has a promising young app called Transdroid (not to be confused with a voice-modulating app of the same name) that lets you check up on your precious torrents from a distance.

It’ll work with Transmission, µTorrent, plain BitTorrent or Deluge, as long as you have a version that supports a web UI. Go look for it in the preferences, I’ll wait.

It’s not exactly the full Android experience, but if you’re wondering what it might be like to run the mobile OS on a computer about the size and speed of… well, the one you’re reading this on, then these guys have something for you. A disc image, to be specific. With an x86-compatible version of Android on it, if you really must know.

Just as we can look forward to the “two major, two minor” updates a year for Android, it looks like we can count on them to respond to pressure from both users and competitors when it comes to feature inclusion. At a recent T-Mo/Google event, Google’s Andy Rubin discussed some future capabilities for Android, although nothing was set in stone.

Increased social networking options were on the agenda; for example, Rubin said that when a person called, their Facebook status could pop up along with the name. Personally, I’d rather just see the name and a photo, but I’m sure it’d be optional. A single synergy-like contact page for a person, however, with phone, facebook updates, pictures and so on, would be welcome.

Walid Abu-Hadba, Microsoft’s Vice President of Developer and Platform Evangelism, has gone on record to say that “[m]ost of what Google does is defensive.” He has an interesting point: all of the non-search stuff that Google invests in keep its would-be competitors on their toes, and prevent those would-be competitors from encroaching upon the cash cow of Google’s operation: search.

Although John Gruber is an avowed masticator, I do enjoy his take on issues dealing with and pertaining to technology. To wit: his take on Chrome OS which, in a few paragraphs, boils down the entire argument to “We don’t know enough yet to decide but things look interesting, although it seems like it might be a certain form of vaporware.”

John pooh poohs Google Chrome OS, just like he pooh poohed the Palm Pre. John’s a smart guy, and has some good insights into the technology world. But on the issue of Google Chrome OS, I think he’s wrong. Google isn’t in the operating system market, it’s in the software services market. The easier Google can make it to get to their hosted applications, the more customers they’ll have. To paraphrase Larry Ellison’s famous quote, “the web is the operating system”.

It’s hard to type a blog post when one hand is being used to pat myself on the back.

Last year I wrote a post about the just launched Chrome browser titled Meet Chrome, Google’s Windows Killer. From that article:

Chrome is nothing less than a full on desktop operating system that will compete head on with Windows…Expect to see millions of web devices, even desktop web devices, in the coming years that completely strip out the Windows layer and use the browser as the only operating system the user needs.

One representative response to my quote above, from The Register: “In no way can this statement be construed to make sense, and I’m not just being a pedantic asshole here. Fortunately, El Reg readers are with it enough to know that you need a proper OS before you can have a browser.”